chooby's VCE Journal

[Sine]

Yea, we just got emailed lecture notes for tommorow and I understand absolutely nothing. Don't think I'm going to spend as much effort for this subject because I definitely need to put more of that effort into English and Methods. Hopefully it helps me to understand the stuff we are learning in VCE soon. Do you know if it's worth doing practice questions throughout the year for Uni Chem?

Textbook questions can be useful but doing all of them can be a little tedious especially for an increment subject. Make sure to drill out the tutorial questions, they are quite representative of what comes up on the exam and helps with understanding, they might not be posted yet but once "actual" uni students start they should be up. Also remember MUEP chem is basically twice as hard as what a normal uni student would have it since they cover 3 hours of lectures in 2 hours (sometimes 1-1.5hours) and you don't get any tutorials to reionforce your understanding.

[chooby]

Guess who forgot to update their journal and is doing it very last minute when they should be preparing to sleep? Let's do this

2018 : Week 8 : 18th of Feb to 24th of Feb

Once again another broken week for Term 1.

As for English and Chemistry, its been same old same old regarding content as we are working towards upcoming SACs in the next two weeks. For English, I've got a practice SAC on Tuesday, and I'm hoping to smash out another draft with a new prompt before then. As for Chemistry, we just found out that our experimental design is going to be on the energy content of biodiesel and petrodiesel so just going over their chemical structure and explaining why petrodiesel has a higher energy content and such. Also did the practice experimental method write-up they provided for us so I'll try and seek feedback before the SAC on Tuesday. In Methods, we got our first quizzes on calculus and addition of ordinates back, and I'm honestly quite disappointed with my marks. Got 16/24 and while a few of them were from mistakes such as subbing in the wrong values into an equation, most of the marks lost were due to misconceptions, unknown knowledge or merely forgetting about specific concepts that justify why certain questions were only one mark.  I've written out how to solve them now but my Methods teacher did suggest that we look over our text-book questions and work out why we got questions wrong and learn from them so I'm basically going to go re-do an entire chapter on application this week. In Physics, we've breezed through projectile motion and completed our first prac. I still need to catch up on the textbook questions and the Edrolo for this subject though. The second sesh of MUEP Chem I found to be a lot more calming as it mainly ran over periodic trends. Since Monash courses are starting this week as well, us MUEP students are finally getting access to videos and questions to help aid our notes as well.

However, all this happened in only two days as we had our Year 12 Camp which spanned from Wednesday to Friday. The campsite was near the beach so the school had a lot of beach stuff planned like snorkelling and paddleboarding which, aside from hanging out with everyone, was my favourite part. They even let us out at around 6:30 in the morning to go on beach walks where we got to see dolphins and just have a relaxing walk before breakfast. In between all the activities we had a bunch of talks on a variety of things such as how to get good sleep, interview tips, positive education and a few motivational speakers. While some of the talks were very useful, I'm pretty sure everyone was too tired to keep up and listen to it all. All in all, it was a relaxing camp which only made me realise that I should dig deep for Year 12 and make the most of the year, both academically and personally.

I'm really pushing my sleeping schedule now so I'll just end it there. See you guys next week!!

[chooby]

2018 : Week 9 : 15th of Feb to 3rd of March
Far out. It's already been one month since Year 12 has started. I'm looking back at my previous entires and everything seems like it happened ages ago!!

Started off the week with the last TuteSmart sesh on the creative SAC. Overall fairly useful but out of the whole lesson I definitely took two things away; one being the sense of verisimilitude and the other narrative techniques such as time freezing and bookends. Definitely going to try and incorporate those into my draft.

Let's start with Chemistry this time. We had the first part of our investigation SAC which was the method write-up on Tuesday, and I started the day fairly confident with what I needed to do. The experimental design was fairly straight forward: burn a fuel of known mass under a beaker of water, observe the temperature change and calculate efficiency then burn one of the diesels under the water, get that temperature change and calculate the energy content while taking the efficiency into account. Yet throughout the day, I noticed I was getting more and more stressed and started worrying about things I didn't know I had to worry about and its definitely from being around people who were stressed as well. Fair enough since this the first SAC for a good majority of people. As soon as they started worrying about one thing, I started worrying about it too, and the cycle continued throughout the day until the SAC came around. Yet, the SAC itself was a lot easier than I originally thought, and many of the little details based on previous SACs weren't relevant this year. Next time a major SAC rolls around, definitely going to try and get some alone time to rethink and just calm down. Next week we will be doing the practical portion of the investigation SAC so we can get results to write about and I'll being writing up an introduction in 2 weeks so the teachers have provided us articles that we need to summarise and reference before then so I'm going to try and break it up over this week.

In English, we had our first practice SAC for our Creative SAC this Wednesday, and I thought I absolutely flunked it. My original story had very unclear thematic links to Island and didn't really match the prompts given to us, so I had to make up a completely different story on the spot. I was only able to write two pages with a lot of the space being words I crossed out, but I think my SOI saved it. I was able to create links to both the prompt and Island as well as include some nice symbolism on colour and how it drives the story which I'm personally proud of. Comparing this rushed piece, to my original drafts, my teacher personally liked the rushed piece better and told me it would work well for the SAC if I changed a few things around such as the actual format of the piece and some weird character voice stuff here and there. FInished a draft of it a few hours ago taking into account the feedback I had received from her as well as a few friends so hopefully, I can change it a bit, so it's a lot better before the SAC.

For Physics, we have a SAC coming up in about 2 - 3 weeks on AOS 3, and we are only getting into the hard stuff now: Special Relativity. I knew this was on the study design and as soon as I saw it, I knew this is where my brain is going to explode... and so far I'm not wrong. I'm still trying to wrap my head around relativity as a concept and aAGhh . Luckily our Physics teachers know this is the hardest concept in the AOS, so they are trying to get a whole bunch of different resources for different kinds of learners so that we have the best chance of understanding this and I'm very grateful that they are doing that. Apart from looking into the Edrolo, I'll need to start doing some revision on classical motion so that it's consolidated. Been able to keep up with the textbook chapters so still going strong so far.

Not much is happening in Methods right now. So far we are covering transformations of graphs and understanding properties of graphs with a power of p/q. While I'm starting to understand the properties of those graphs I finALLY understand how dilations work!! It's taken me since Year 8 to understand the wording of 'from x' or 'to y' and understanding how to transform a graph, but it all finally clicked today! Covered two chapters in the SUP today so I think I'm all caught up for now. Might try and get ahead tomorrow if I have time.

As for MUEP Chem, I've noticed that I'm really tired for the first 30 minutes, but then I'm suddenly really alert afterwards. Definitely more evident in this session though since all over my notes, you could see where I started to fall asleep and the pen trails off into random scribbles. Might try taking a nap afterschool so that I can stay awake the whole time this week. I've really been trying to do summary notes for this class on OneNote to keep everything summarised, but I still haven't been able to get through first week's notes. Might start on second week's notes today since that what our first assessed pre-quiz is on. Content-wise, it's been getting easier since it's building off of things we have learnt previously in school such as periodic trends and structure of chemicals, so I'm not stressing out as much.

School Related but not VCE Thingys

- The Christian group at the school is going really well so far. We've had about 20 people come in on our latest session and the messages being spoken are absolutely amazing. Going to invite more people soon!!
- Joined the school's Philosophy Club. Since I have to stay back on Wednesdays because of music commitments I can't leave early so why not join a new club? So far I have no idea what is going on. But I think I'll get the hang of it soon later never help me
- Parliament's Leadership Camp is coming up this week on Thursday and Friday so I'll be going to that. I went last year and it was absolutely amazing and I learnt a lot about how I work as a leader and in a team and I can't wait to go back. This means some of the SAC-related stuff such as SOI writing and intro writing have been moved to the week after but all the admin stuff has already been sorted with
- My friends dragged me to go to badminton this Friday, and I was super sceptical. I'm not a sports person. Don't follow and don't play it competitively but I actually had a lot of fun. Was definitely scared at first since it was very out of my comfort zone but I soon realised no-one cared how bad I was. Sure they'd laugh whenever I screwed up and missed the shuttlecock when serving but I did it to them too. It's all in good fun. Some of my friends are absolute MASTERS at this so I've been getting tips on them on how to play and technique and stuff and I'll try to go ore often. That and it just adds to the exercise I should be doing.

Music Related Thingys

- Choir is getting the hang of things now. We started our first piece 'When She Loved Me' from Toy Story 2 and it's a pretty easy piece apart from all the rubato which is all dependent on our choir director. We also started doing student-run sectionals this year so practice felt a lot more intimate and more connected I think. After this I think we are getting start on some music from The Greatest Showman so I'm definitely excited for that.
- In the chamber choir, our teacher is really knuckling down on practicing this year and putting effort into the pieces for Gambier. So far, we are sounding pretty good. We're getting out notes but we definitely need to focus on dynamics and blending together. We'll need to send her a recording of our parts by Monday so I'll end up doing that tomorrow.
- For Stage Band, I think I'm really getting to know the others in the rhythm section and hopefully that shows through our playing. Definitely need to practice both my pieces. One of 'em I'm just doing a walking bass line which I have pretty much learnt but there is a section where it's just chords so I'm going to need to learn those. In another piece, I have the main melody with bass trombone so I still need to work on that entire piece.

Outside School Thingys

- Went back on the cameras for church last week and I basically got put on the spot and did first camera. Essentially, I was in charge of all the close-up shots and following the speaker. While during praise and worship it was all right, it meant I had to zone out during the speaker and focus on following them so definitely a test of my focus.
- Year 12 Formal is coming up soon. I have no idea what I'm doing. Or what I'm going to wear. Main idea is just black everything with really fancy undershirt. Help pls.

Okay, this week's post is actually really long (and I hope I write as much during my English SAC this Wednesday) so thanks for reading this until the end. or for scrolling directly to the bottom of the post I'll see you guys next week!

[chooby]

So I've been MIA for the past few weeks because reasons so I'll try to remember what's happened to the best of my abilities!
2018 : Week 10, Week 11 and Week 12 : 4th of March to 24th of March

So for English, we had our Creative SAC. In all honesty, I think I went alright with this SAC. The prompts were really broad (thank goodness because my story didn't fit in with very typical themes) and I was able to remember a good majority of what I had written in my drafts. As for the SOI, they didn't expect as much as I thought they would so I ended writing a lot more indepth. Still struggled to get all of FLAP - C but we do get our results this week so I'm anxious to see what I got. We've just started with our text response with Burial Rites. As of right now, I've annotated up to Chapter 9 of the book and we've just gone through Chapter 1 in class pretty recently. I'll try looking on the site to see if there are any practice topics that I could start drafting for it. To speed up the process of getting through the book, the class has been split up with each group analysing a certain chapter and creating a slideshow which is shared to the rest of the class. The SAC is in about a month from now so after I post this I'm going to be writing up a plan for a draft essay and writing it throughout this week!

In Chemistry, we had finally completed the investigation SAC on Fuels!! On the 5th, we had our practical for the SAC where we basically burnt a bunch of fuels and we were able to get the results pretty quickly. Breathed in a few fumes from the petrodiesel but I think I'm okay. The week after I did both the introduction writing and the discussion and analysis part of the essay. From what I remember, it was relatively okay, definitely a bit of a time crunch but managed to complete it all on time. Right now we've breezed through redox and galvanic cells and are currently looking into different types of cells and yeah. Since the SAC it's been pretty smooth.

Physics right now is also going pretty well. We just had our Motion SAC pretty recently and I honestly thought I would have a harder time with special relativity but our teachers were able to explain it really well. This SAC actually marked the last of my SACs for this term so definitely very relieving to have it completed. We've just started on fields and because we had gone through orbital mechanics in our motion SAC, we're going stright into electric fields and yeah I'm pretty excited.

Methods has been a pretty rough ride so far. We've been having these quizzes after every topic and the first few haven't been the best. I'm averaging around a 50 - 60% right now and we just completed the topics on polynomials and transformations and we'll be moving onto exponentials and logarithms this week. I've started to make a book with all the mistakes from my tests and practice SACs in the hopes that I can improve.

Okay, I've really stalled this post for too long. I really want to expand more on what's happened in my non academic life since not much has happened after the SACs. Might make a post tommorow or some other time this week but yea! I'll see you guys around!

[sarangiya]

Congratulations on a great term and finishing your SACs so far!
Awesome that you're preparing for English so diligently. I'll have to take a leaf out of your book.
Hope you have a great last week(?) and enjoy a well-deserved rest!

P.S. no petrol sniffing!! Haha

[chooby]

Congratulations on a great term and finishing your SACs so far!
Awesome that you're preparing for English so diligently. I'll have to take a leaf out of your book.
Hope you have a great last week(?) and enjoy a well-deserved rest!

P.S. no petrol sniffing!! Haha

Heh. I'll try not to sniff any more petrol fumes. Hope you had an amazing holiday as well!!

So I wanted to wait until the end of the first week of holidays before I posted anything because not a lot was happening on the last week of school and at the start of holidays but I forgot to post over the weekend due to MUEP Chem Labs and a sleepover the weekend, so I'll try to update you guys with as much as I can remember!

2018 : Week 13 and Week 14 : 25th of March to 7th of April
Not much happened in the last week of school. We're still churning through Burial Rites in English, and we've moved onto electrical fields in Physics. We finished off fuel cells in Chemistry and had just recapped what we learnt in Methods so far. The major thing that did happen was the SAC scores we received. We haven't received out Chemistry SAC marks back, but we did get our Physics and English marks back. I averaged a 'high' in the English Creative SAC (don't really remember what letter grade correlates with it) which I'm honestly really happy about. Hopefully, if I start drafting sooner and getting feedback in my essays for text response!! We also got our Motion SACs for Physics and I got around 78%. While it was a pretty decent score, I'm kinda disappointed with myself because I made a lost a otl of marks due to stupid mistakes and misconceptions which could've been avoided had I started revision sooner. Definitely made me realise that I need to step up my game for the final year.

Before holidays started, I compiled a giant to-do list of things I should do before Term 2 and set different deadlines for each task. Well, that's already been tRASHed mainly because I packed too many things into the two weeks forgetting that I had other commitments already. After a few days, I've shortened my list down, but it's definitely a crunch still:
- Annotate 20 pages of Burial Rites a day (If I can keep this up, I should have annotated the whole book in about six days)
- Chemistry Fuel Cells Summary (this got emailed to us around start of holidays, and I've got a plan set out on how to complete so it should be okay)
- Update Physics Cheat Sheet (just gotta make sure this is constantly being worked on so I don't stress at the end of the year and I can use bits and pieces for my SACs)
- Write up 2 English Practice Essays (Our English teacher gave us two practice topics to work on, and I was hoping to finish one each week, goin g to try and do one timed and the other super open book and at least finished by the start of Term 2)
- Continue Start Methods Bound Reference (same deal with the cheat sheet, would help with revision for future SACs too)

I also have to finish four MUEP Chem reports by Thursday and Friday. We had our labs last Thursday and Friday, and it puts you into the zone as to what you're learning and how to apply it to the experiments. From numerous titrations to transforming a copper chloride solution into solid copper, the labs were both intense yet intriguing at the same time and reminded me how awesome science can be. I was hoping to write reports over the weekend but was occupied in a pre-planned sleepover, so I'm trying to cram it in now. Even though this is only an aggregate subject, I still want to do well in it ya know?

I also wanted to give you guys an update/summary about what has been happening in stuff non VCE related as well as plans for the future which will probably keep me busy for a while so I put it in spoilers for those who want to read about that and get to know a bit more about me!!

Leadership Camp

Our Leadership Camp occurred on Week 10 and was definitely an impactful camp to stay the least. The school's Student Parliament was invited and I'm glad Music Captains snuck into it this year. We headed over to Lyrebird Park learnt a lot about the type of leader that we are as well as our typical strengths and weaknesses. There were definitely a few highlights of the camp though, first one being this huge tree we got harnessed to. We pretty much scaled the tree, went across a diving board thing and free fall until they caught us before reaching the bottom. I don't really know how else to explain this but there's a video of my friend doing it on Instagram @kai.pal (I told him I would give him a plug ). Another major highlight was on the final day where the whole camp did a group challenge. We were broken up into mini groups and were allocated an area with different sized containers. We were assigned a communicator who would run over to the central hub and organise how to get the buckets to the middle and stack them within each other. Not allowed to directly touch or be within two meters of any bucket, we somehow got all 8 - 10 ish buckets to the centre and stack them but unfortunately we went overtime . Final highlight was definitely when the principle and vice principle came over and talked us through how the school runs, how school policies are made as well as improvements to the school that are based on the overall scores from strength surveys the school does. Definitely huge motivation and feels like we have a voice in the school. 

Formal

Literally a week after Leadership Camp and it's time to stress about the Year 12 Formal. Honestly such an amazing nice and I'm glad I took some time over the weekend to pick out my suit and made sure everything fit well. I also put on contacts on for the first time and a lot of people couldn't recognise me because of it which was pretty funny. Loved seeing everyone dress up super fancy <3

Music Immersion Week

This was an event the other music captains had been planning since around the end of last year. Essentially for the whole week, ensembles would take the whole day to practice their music and perform for the rest of the school in a lunchtime concert at the end of the week. While I had to balance out when I left for ensembles because I didn't want to miss out on class, we had a free day on Thursday for Parent Teacher Interviews so our Stage Band took this opportunity to take our ensemble practice outside of the school. We headed over to Laneway Studios in Richmond and rehearsed there and the place has such an awesome aesthetic that matched with the rest of Richmond. It felt like a small gem hidden down a random alleyway. As for the actual concert, it ran pretty smoothly! We somehow managed to fit all the ensemble performances within an hour with smooth transitions between each and a pretty good turnout.

Plans for the Future

Can you tell that I'm starting to write less and less with each spoiler? Anyways, I have a few things planned for the future that aren't VCE related. Firstly, Generations In Jazz is coming up really soon! Still practicing hard for both Stage Band and Chamber Choir and it's starting to come together! We have another holiday rehearsal for Stage Band this Friday so I'm excited for that. We also have a Music Camp coming up too! I didn't want to talk about it here in case it didn't happen but we've been planning this camp from the ground-up since it technically got cancelled because of Music Immersion. RIght now we are just ensuring numbers, getting supervision as well as planning out the itinerary. This has practically become my passion project of the year so I'm super hyped that its working out. Very grateful to the Music Team . Harmony Day (or Diversity Dya in most other places) is coming soon and a bunch of us decided to carry on the legacy of the Kpop Dance Group!! There has been one every year and since the last group graduated it's up to us to step up and take it. Practicing has become my gateway into Kpop and Kdrama... started watching Pinocchio and am currently obsessed with TWICE. Send help.

So that's it for now!! I'll try and get back to regular updating when I can, and I'll see you guys around!!

[chooby]

2018 : Week 15 : 8th of April to 14th of April
Let's hope I start staying consistent with these journal entries again.

Last week of holidays was easily one of the most stressful. Spent most of the week writing up four different discussions of scientific reports in MUEP Chem. Haven't done much in terms of actual holiday homework but I have completed the Chemistry Fuels Summary and have started updating my Physics Cheat Sheet so I've got that going for me. Not much has happened between the last post and this one but I'm going to try and chill with the last day of holidays. I start school again on Monday so I'm going to have to get used to early wake-ups and being tired again. I've tried scheduling my entire week to find out what time slots I have free to study and do homework and I don't really have a lot. Going to need to prioritise a lot harder. I also got a new desk from IKEA!! Everything's a lot more organised now and yeah it looks really nice. I'll make a longer post once the stress of school kicks back in so I'll see you guys then!!

[chooby]

2018 : Week 16 and Week 17 : 15th of April to 28th of April
Back again two weeks later and boy have these two weeks been hectic and it's only going to get more so for the next month!!

Subject wise I'm starting to worry a lot about everything. We've pretty much finished all of AOS 1 in Physics and since we learnt about orbital mechanics during AOS 3 which we did earlier, we pretty much breezed through electric fields, magnetic fields and have since moved onto applications. My brain felt like it got bigger when we connected projectile motion and electric fields. Our SAC is going to be on the 8th of May so only a few weeks left. Going to try and spend this week working on my cheat sheet as well as doing one or two practice SACs beforehand so that I'm somewhat prepared.

Methods is starting to come around. We are almost finished the topic of exponentials and log functions and I'm still up to date with the SUP work provided for us!! We also had our first quiz of the term yesterday and I didn't want to mess up like I did last time. I did two practice quizzes and had them corrected and checked through the worked solutions and after coming out of that quiz I felt really good so things are looking up for me there.

We've finallt moved onto electrolysis in chemistry and I feel like we are so behind form the rest of the state. Luckily they're really comprehensive about it and I can also learn ahead with Edrolo. We still haven't gotten our previous SAC marks back but the other classes have and so far it's not looking too good. Overall the cohort had a pretty low average and I'm just getting more and more anxious about my own mark. We also have another Chem SAC a week after the Physics SAC so going to try and do a few practice SACs beforehand.

Then there's English. Our Text Response SAC is coming up in two weeks and I'm pretty nervous about it. Text Response has always been one of the worst parts for me and I'm getting anxious because I know I have to do well this year. I never got around to actually writing those practice essays yet but we did have a practice SAC and while I did okay, there were so many fundamentals that I wasn't able to hit. Going to write one tomorrow at TuteSmart since I'm going early and I'm going to use cue cards to help me memorise quotes.

I'm going to be pretty busy for the next three weeks so I'm probably not going to update anytime soon after this (not like I was updating regularly beforehand but..) but if you'd like to know what's going on I'll leave a spoiler below. Hope the other journalists are surviviing through this term and I wish everyone the best of luck!!

Things currently streSSING ME OUt

These next three weeks are going to be the busiest I'm going to be. This coming week is Mount Gambier so I'm practising like crazy for both of my ensembles. To help practice in front of a crowd both ensembles will be performing at Info Night this Wednesday so I'm staying back for that. Then once Friday comes around that's my entire weekend gone and spent at Gambier. Going to bring my cue cards of English quotes as well as one SAC for both Physics and Chem to do on the bus ride there so that I can be somewhat productive. However, I still want to enjoy my time and not worry about anything else but the music. This is right before the Physics and English SAC. Then the week after we have the Chemistry SAC as well as Harmony Day. I'm part of two dance performances so I gotta find time to rehearse for those with the groups. Then at the end of the week, we have Music Camp which there still needs to be tons of planning for so yeah that's what the next three weeks look like.